Then I wandered by into Berlin for a few days. Went to the Bannat Sporting Goods store just off the Kurfurstendamn (or the Ku’damn as the locals call it), the big shopping drag in Berlin.

Kurfurstendamn

The Bannat is arguably one of the best sporting goods stores in the world and the only one I know of that has a wide selection of size 16 hiking boots (although I need only size 13s).

View on the Ku’damn

I also wandered by the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin, which features a lot of exhibits from the glory days of archeology when if you saw something you liked in some foreign country—a huge statue, a fortress wall, a whole building, or whatever—you just carted it home and put it in your museum.

For example:

Here is part of the Mshatta Palace built it Turkey c. 740 A.D. It was disassembled rock by rock, moved here to the Pergamonmuseum, and reassembled.

 Or how about this:

You will probably remember this as Ishtar’s Gate from Babylon, in what is now Iraq, 6th century B.C. Moved here piece by piece and reassembled.

Or this:

The interior of a merchant’s house from the Syrian city of Aleppo, 16th century A.D. No word on where the merchant moved to.

Or this:

Stone statues from Assyria, 12th century, BC

And finally:

Turkish carpets, 15th A.D. Suspiciously like the carpets I just recently bought in India.